The vessel, however, was acting as though she considered it a tremendous sea. Had she been dismasted or a steamer her behaviour could not have been worse. Her sails a little steadied her, but her rollings and motions and plungings and heavings were sickening and insufferable, because she was nearly full of water. She had no buoyancy and the seas made a rock of her, and often sprang in green sheets right over her--a wet and yelling game of leap-frog. Late in the afternoon, when it was almost dark, one of these seas filled the caboose and swept it to leeward, where it lay stranded. The outcry of hurled ironmongery, of crashing china, of skipping knives and forks, pot, kettles, and pans, along with the noise of the splintering caboose, was enough to make Hardy think that the brig was scattering under their feet. The girl grasped his hand when that sea came and the galley went; she thought it was all over with them. Hardy kept his thoughts to himself: his real anxiety was in the boat, which might be washed overboard or dashed into staves, and in the deck-house, which was their only shelter. Happily the old bucket had taken up her position on her own account, and it was chiefly the bows and amidships which got the drenches; it was seldom that the deck-house was struck by a sea whose weight was a menace. "It is miserable to be without light at sea," said Hardy, "on a black night in heavy weather. But there is no lamp here and none in the berths, and if there was where should I find oil? We must face it through, Julia, and you must sleep." "I have had more sleep than I want," replied Julia. "I shall not mind the darkness if the bell isn't struck." "It may be struck by a rope, by nothing else. If a ghost, how could an essence grasp substance? How could something you could walk through lift a knife or try and pull down a lamp-post?" "I sha'n't like it if I hear it," she replied. "Oh, how dreadful to think of him washing about under us! Wretched man! You should have seen the unearthly expression of his face whilst he sat staring forward, waiting for the little drummer to appear." "The great poet is true," said Hardy, who had fingered a few volumes in his day, albeit he was a sailor in the Merchant Service of England. "'For shapes which come not at an earthly call Will not depart when mortal voices bid; Lords of the visionary eye whose lid, Once raised, remains aghast and will not fall.'" "Those words are true of that poor dead man," said Julia. "Aghast! you should have seen him when he turned up his eyes to God and prayed."